Making “Get Well Soon” – Part 11

By early June, Ian’s son was home. Things had gradually returned to some sense of normalcy, and Ian had begun working on a shorter cut of the 30 minute assembly. Another 10 minutes of footage were shed. At that early stage, a part of me honestly thought that it couldn’t get any shorter.

This cut included additional macro footage Rory had filmed; water droplets splashing from taps, dripping on to aspirin, running over rust and startling high-definition textures. In a sense, I wanted the film to be the bleakest music video in the world. I had no perspective on the pacing, no perspective on the necessity to whittle down all the beautiful images to only what was necessary. I was so in awe of the way the footage looked that I didn’t want Ian to remove a thing.

Unsurprisingly, Gregory from BRAG felt that the 20 minute version still looked like an ‘assembly’ rather than a ‘cut’, so between mid and late June, the film went through another 6 cuts. The running time gradually shrank each time, leaving us with a 14 minute version. Gregory also felt it might be useful to screen what we had in front of some industry professionals in order to get an outside perspective.

We also began thinking about how the sound would be treated. There was a problem with the radio mics that we’d used on the first weekend of filming, as well as several shots where things happened in the distance. Gregory advised that we would want to consider a half/full day of ADR recording and a half day of Foley recording, (as well as some time back at Jack’s house recording silence so that any added noise could be placed in context).

There was also the matter of the trailer; it was difficult to know how to pitch the tone of this. The 14 minute version was neither quite a horror, or a thriller, or a sad love story, but a combination of all three. How could you pitch that tone in a 30 second trailer, and still make it digestible?

Around this time, Rory referred back to an earlier piece of film Ian had worked on called ‘Inside Out God’; this featured a rather abstract use of meat, (for want of a better description).

This clip had stayed with Rory, and he was keen to work on something similar to make ‘Get Well Soon’ a bit more nightmarish. So – Ian and Rory arranged to meet Ian’s friend and band-mate in Hag – a chef by trade, who could get his hands on some brains and lungs…